Structure Design of an "Open-Bore" Electromagnetic Launcher

Abstract

An "open-bore" railgun, a small bore of 14 mm with vented top and bottom, was designed especially for the Beijing Institute of Technology Armature Tester (BITAT) Electromagnetic Launcher (EML) Program. This novel design may be a possible solution to avoiding forming "secondary arc", and will be mainly employed as a plasma armature tester in the near future. In this paper, a series of numerical simulations on the structural strength and deformation of our railgun are investigated by using the finite element method. A simple plate-mechanics model is also proposed to evaluate the maximum permissible EM force on the insulated support plates. Finally, the optimum design of our railgun is suggested based on the results of the numerical simulations.